


Cuckoo Nest

by NevillesGran



Category: Middlegame - Seanan McGuire
Genre: Found Family, Gen, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-02
Updated: 2020-04-19
Packaged: 2021-02-28 20:15:10
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 18
Words: 18,180
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23443057
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NevillesGran/pseuds/NevillesGran
Summary: If everyone in the nest is a cuckoo, then it's just a family of weird birds.(Or: a full month of post-canon Middlegame fics about...well, Word of Seanan is that Dodger takes about five years to figure out how exactly to make a perfect timeline. So what else do she, Roger, Tim and Kim do in that time?)
Comments: 37
Kudos: 49





	1. TILThat

**Author's Note:**

> AKA the "fuck it, I'm sheltering in place for all of April so I might as well do the Post-Canon Middlegame Fic [Insert Month Here] Challenge I've been thinking about since I read the book last summer" collection!
> 
> This first one, obviously, would take place several years post-canon. ~~Also technically I wrote it months ago and just never published it, but I was legitimately fairly busy today and I know that if I don't start this before I go to sleep on the 1st, I won't do it.~~ Full disclosure: I have very little idea is this is an accurate depiction of linguistics academia.

**TILthat  
** TIL that the original Little Mermaid was actually a lesbian romance

 **garrulousgaity  
** only ONE _CRACKPOT_ at UC Berkeley thinks that

 **immabookworm23  
** wow, study at Oxford much?

 **allcassandrasareright  
** I gotta say, I did a research project once that involved tracking academic citations, as an example of tribalism in arguments and increasing trends of polarization in society, and I’m not saying _crackpot_ , but I still remember Middleton as being the far end of the bell curve, in terms of pretty much _only_ being cited positively by people who probably literally interacted with him irl. So either I’m saying (persuasive?) crackpot, or, as of last spring at least, I’m saying localized mind control exclusively with regards to weird theories of translating, like, ancient greek

 **commmmunis  
** did i just stumble on the iceberg tip of some huge angry academic fight?

 **notthewalrus  
** OMG YES. ok ok, I am here to explain the Huge Angry Academic Fight that has been the most entertaining thing in my subject (Historical Linguistics) for the last year and a half 

  * It started in June 2019, in Vol.23 Issue 2 of the academic journal _Ancient Texts_ (imaginative name, I know). Roger Middleton, a professor at UC Berkeley, published a short article about how in this esoteric fragment of Proto-Norse poetry, a woman pleading with her son not to go to war doesn’t address him as “father’s son” but “fatherland’s son”, which...has some poetic implications, basically; it’s not important. He didn’t have a lot to back it up, but there’s not a lot to back up really anything in Proto-Norse; there’s just not much text that we’ve found. And Middleton has made weirder claims with less evidence before.
  * Because that’s kind of his Thing. You know the dream of being an eccentric aging academic who periodically publishes just bonkers theories but you have too much legitimate research history and also tenure for anyone to get rid of you? Roger Middleton has achieved that dream, except he’s like, 36, which is why I should just give up on this PhD thing right now and go live in a yurt. Also, he’s a terrifying polymath (of ancient languages), has writing credit, solo and group, in articles about not just Proto-Norse but Ancient Greek and Proto-Balto-Slavic and more, and the translation of a whole epic in Old Chinese and MORE.
  * And his articles, particularly the solo ones, have pretty much always been arguments that this phrase or another has traditionally been mistranslated, and it’s really...whatever. Usually he’s gone around and found all the other examples of it, and explained how “tub” is really “glass” in each one, and it’s implied also by this one fragment of tapestry, etc...kind of apropos of nothing, the original translation was fine, but his reasoning makes sense. Once or twice, he seems to have come up with just absolute bullshit, but man does he present it with CONFIDENCE.
  * I only know this bc I’ve looked him up recently, because here’s where it gets good: Middleton is kind of academically weird, but not popular, and only published in niche or not-super-distinguished places (except I guess that Old Chinese translation - a group work led by another professor.) _Ancient Texts_ is respectable but not particularly popular. But the article about that father’s/fatherland’s thing came to the attention of Felicity Wright at Oxford
  * You probably haven’t heard of her if you’re not into translations or Nordic history, but Felicity Wright is like THE scholar of the day in Old and Proto-Norse, and has been for decades. Actually, you might have heard of her if you had a Norse mythology phase in elementary/middle school in the last 20 years, because she wrote _Tales of Thor_ , a collection of mythology retellings that’s pretty popular. 
    * At least, it was when I went through MY elementary/middle school Norse mythology phase
  * More importantly, she wrote the translation of that poem that Middleton was disputing - the preeminent translation - and she’s a little petty? It’s kind of known? So, next issue of the Oxford Journal of Literature Studies comes out in August 2019, and it includes “Man versus Country in ‘The Mother’s Plea’: A Response to Middleton.” 
  * This is pretty much the academic equivalent of saying, “oh, you wanna GO?” - and from Wright, in an Oxford Journal, vs. Middleton in _Ancient Texts_ , it’s kind of like a St Bernard saying that to a fly.
  * As far as I can find, it’s only the second time someone’s taken an entire (short) paper to argue with Middleton, which isn’t strange - his translations are kind of left-field, but like I said, they don’t make waves. Until Wright started shouting him down
  * Because then in the next issue of _Ancient Texts_ , in December, has “Metaphoric Conflation in Proto-Norse Kennings: Response to Wright” by Middleton, in which he defends his argument 
    * Aka “BRING it, you cantankerous hag”
  * In the Feb/March issue of the Scandanavian Journal of History, there’s an article by Richard Andersson of the University of Holland called “Patriotism and Personhood in ‘The Mother’s Plea’: Response to Wright and Middleton”, which was set up like it was trying to reach a compromise...but actually totally sided with Wright. Like I said, she’s THE expert on this stuff, so a lot of people are going to trust her by default. Or maybe Harris was just an old friend, and she realized she had dignity to maintain but she still wanted this upstart smacked down.
  * And he seemed to be smacked down. All quiet on the western (Berkeley, CA) front… 
    * (which is when @allcassandrasareright did their research I guess)
  * Until August 2020, when Middleton published through UC Berkeley Press a whole annotated dictionary of Proto-Norse, complete with citations of attested appearances of every word and how their meaning affects/changes the text - because of course, like HALF of HIS definitions are DIFFERENT than the established translations, at least in nuance and sometimes just straight-up saying something COMPLETELY different.
  * **All. Hell. Breaks. Loose.**
  * (If you have any particular academic investment in Northern European languages. I, working on documenting pre-colonial Philipine languages, am mostly sitting on the sidelines with a bucket of popcorn and an unholy amount of glee)
  * Literally no one’s even sure if he’s been working on this for years and the timing’s just perfect, or maybe he deliberately provoked Wright to build buzz for his dictionary, or if he just wrote the whole thing in 7-12 months out of SHEER SPITE
  * As far as I’ve heard, it’s all about as substantiated as most of Middleton’s stuff? More breadth than depth for sure, but it all HANGS TOGETHER. The internal logic of “Middletonian Proto-Norse” is solid
  * Vs “Oxfordian Proto-Norse”
  * I’m serious. This is serious. I have caught two professors shouting angrily at each other in the lobby of my building
  * I don’t think a single linguistics/history/literature journal has come out in the last - well, there was a lag where people hadn’t written things yet, but from like September to now, early February 2021, I swear there hasn’t been a publication that didn’t include at least SOMETHING about this. Arguments and rejoinders about this word or that. Implications for understanding of Ancient Norse culture and society, and arguments about that. Effects on the interpretations of what scraps of poetry and story there are, which is probably where the TILthat OP came from - The Little Mermaid is a Danish fairy tale, though really no version of it before Hans Christian Anderson (1837) is close enough to be called an “original” of that specific story. Like, yeah, there were stories of mermaids before, but not much on record, and with no clear path of lineage. As far as I know. Like I said, my research is on a completely different continent.
  * But boy is this fun to watch. Middleton hasn’t published anything since, or even said anything to the press, possibly because he dropped the goddamn chaos mic and walked away



**legolassie  
** WOW

 **dictionfairy  
** I’m not in academia but I have been reading linguisics papers for fun since I was a kid (yes I had a weird childhood), and I vouch for the mind control theory

 **balanceamnestytinyheist  
** he has a 5/5 chili peppers on ratemyprofessor...same thing? ;) 

**startreeko  
** Guys can we not start stalking some random professor. Whether he’s a genius or a genius of a troll.

-

<post sent from _pointsevenrepeating_ to _dictionfairy_ >

 **pointsevenrepeating  
** Tim!

 **dictionfairy  
** What? It’s the “the butts match!” principle.   
Anyway, if it’s a problem, they’ll stop it.   
Roger and Dodger, I mean.

 **dictionfairy  
** Anyway anyway, shouldn’t you be asleep?

 **pointsevenrepeating  
** your awake 

**dictionfairy  
** *I* don’t have to wake up at 6am for crew practice.

 **pointsevenrepeating  
** 5:30am  
shut up that’s what coffe’s for


	2. Baseball

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is dedicated to my mother, an avid member of Red Sox Nation, and my D&D group, whom I attempted to introduce to baseball last fall to...no success. It does not, apparently, translate well to tabletop RPGs.

**July**

“Dodger. Dodger.  _ Dodger _ . Are you awake?” 

Dodger was awake, for several reasons. First, Roger’s words were all but intrinsically impossible to ignore, these days, even when she had  _ been _ asleep. Second, their “quantum entanglement” (still not the right way to describe it, but not the most wrong either) was stronger than ever, and she could feel the distress rolling off of him. Third, he was shaking her by the shoulder.

Like any loving sister at five in the morning, she beaned him with a pillow before she opened her eyes. “What’s wrong?”

Roger looked frazzled, as though he’d just woken up. Probably true.

“I think I accidentally subverted the natural course of the 2004 World Series.”

Dodger had to admit, that wasn’t the answer she’d expected.

“...How?” she ventured.

Roger perched on the side of her bed and ran a hand through his hair. “It was my first year in college—my first semester—and I was homesick. Stressed. Lonely. And the Red Sox were doing well already—I’m not much of a sports person, but you couldn’t avoid it and still talk to people that year, in Boston. So I watched a lot of baseball, first semester, and...you know the usual things you shout at the screen, or whisper intently with your fingers crossed and every fiber of your being  _ willing _ them to touch the base, or throw the strike, or strike out…” He grimaced. “Obviously I doubt I did much, but, you know, we were still capable of  _ some _ things at that age…”

Dodger was already running the calculations, based on her knowledge of Roger and Language and the 2004 baseball season. As always, factors she didn’t know filled themselves in by deduction.

“It’s possible,” she conceded after a moment.”Though really, the Cardinals—hey!” She sat up, nearly knocking Roger in the head. “Hey, the Dodgers were in the playoffs that year! Did you rob  _ my _ team of the title?”

“What- you follow sports even less than I do!”

“Shh” Dodger said primly, and jerked her thumb at the ceiling. Kim and Tim shared the master bedroom on the floor above. “Following baseball involves a great deal of math. And my dad grew up—”

Her breath caught in her throat. Roger fished under the blankets to find her hand and hold it. Dodger laid her head on his shoulder.

When she could speak again without choking on tears, Dodger said, “We were a Dodgers household, is what I’m saying. Not as crazy as Red Sox Country—”

“Red Sox Nation,” Roger said automatically, and accepted the gentle elbow to his ribs.

“My  _ point _ is...” Dodger trailed off, blinking at her dark bedroom as she extrapolated from 2004. “Huh. They’ve been pretty good recently, actually. And still no World Series.”

Roger hummed in agreement. “Red Sox, too. Nice, after 86 years...”

Dodger lifted her head off his shoulder, and their eyes met with the spark of a feeling known to all siblings: the moment it becomes a  _ competition _ .

“...Of course, we’re not going to use alchemically-gifted reality-warping powers to affect the outcome of the American baseball season,” said Dodger.

“That would almost certainly be unethical,” said Roger, who’d never really gotten the hang of lying.

—

**August**

“Anything interesting in the news today?” 

The question was twice-redundant—Roger looked at the newspaper himself through Dodger’s eyes, while his hands moved automatically through the motions of making coffee, and it was printed text within ten feet of him. He’d know what the news was if he thought about it for a moment. But it was the thought that counted.

_ Just sports scores _ , Dodger replied mentally as she ate her cereal. She radiated the satisfaction of a cat as she drank the milk.

-

“Come on,” Roger breathed. “Hit... _ hit _ …”

There was a knock on the doorframe and he jumped, guiltily dropping his phone in his lap. MLB.com’s play-by-play continued unabated.

“I’m prepping coursework!”

“Oh—I’m sorry. I can come back later.” Tim stood in the doorway like a skittish cat with perfect posture. One hand was still raised to knock; the other cradled an open notebook just barely balancing a pencil. One foot was turned out to spin and run. 

Roger sometimes thought that he should have shot Reed a couple more times. He left his phone in his lap, closed his laptop (which really did have a half-written syllabus on it), and tried to project as much genuine, non-Machiavellian welcome as possible. 

“What’s up?”

—

**September**

The pitch went high (87mph), the batter hit it solidly (BA, .246; HR, 258; RBI 651); the Dodgers’ new third baseman caught it (BA, .272; HR, 170; RBI 302) and threw to second (BA, .239; HR, 298; RBI 752), who caught it and swiveled to first and its approaching runner, and Dodger frisbee-tossed a potato chip directly at Roger’s ear so he’d stop jinxing her team out of a double-play. It wasn’t aerodynamic ammo, but it did fine for short-range.

“Hey!”

Dodger sipped her extremely hard apple cider at him (much better than beer.) 

“The inning’s over already?” Kim asked, from the second loveseat she and Tim shared. “I thought it goes up to three strikes.”

“Three outs,” Tim corrected, with Wikipedia open on his phone. He fished absentminded in the bowl of pretzels they’d claimed. “But...I also thought…”

“It’s a double-play,” Dodger explained over the start of the commercial break. “The guys on first  _ and _ second base got tagged out, so two separate outs happened, and that’s three total so the inning’s over. Three strikes to an out, unless they’re tagged, which is an out each, and three outs to an inning—per team, I guess. Three outs to a half-inning.”

“You’d have to manifest an avatar of Arcane Athletic Rules to follow this,” Kim complained, and froze for just a moment before Dodger laughed.

“It’s really not that complicated,” Roger promised, with the earnestness of a man raised in Red Sox Nation. “Like we said earlier, each team is at bat until the team in the field gets them ‘out’ three times. The simplest way to do that is by striking them out…” 

His voice shifted audibly into Lecture Mode (Patient), and Dodger settled back with their chips. By definition, Roger would explain it better, though it might take a while.

Ten minutes later he stole the bowl back and whispered in her ear, “I  _ know _ you’re playing the odds right now. I can  _ tell _ . Would you stop that.”

-

But...you know how the story goes. High school classes picked up and more importantly, so did college classes, shifting from the first hectic days of the semester to the first essays and tests, midterms on the horizon before anyone could blink. With a little more space to herself each day and a little more time passed since...everything in June, Dodger started to calculate the perfect timeline in earnest. It was going to take years, she could already tell (it didn’t have to, but she wanted to do this methodical and  _ right _ .) And they both suddenly had a pair of sheltered, whip-smart, authority-wary teenagers to feed, house, and generally support. 

Dodger kept an eye on the statistics, and made a tweak here and there where she could get away with it—where neither past nor future would be upset too badly. Roger knew, in the same way he knew how his arms were moving, that he wasn’t  _ really _ doing much by suggesting outcomes to not-quite-live online feeds. He missed most games anyway. The season ended and the Playoffs began—including both the Boston Red Sox and the Los Angeles Dodgers—and they were  _ busy _ .

—

**October**

“Roger! Roger, Roger—”

“I’m awake—” Roger sat up with a jolt, avoiding hitting his head against his sister’s only because she pulled back. “What’s wrong, what’s—”

Dodger stared back at him with wild eyes and severe bedhead. “The Cubs. I stopped paying attention—you did too—and the last game is tomorrow and  _ all the math says the Cubs are going to win _ .”

“The- Chicago Cubs? The ‘haven’t won the World Series since…’”

“‘1908’ Chicago Cubs.” Dodger nodded.

Roger gaped at her in the dark of his bedroom. 

“...Did  _ we _ do that?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the record, both the Red Sox and the Dodgers WERE in the post-season in both 2004 and 2016. No more detailed information about individual players or games presented in this fic is real.
> 
> Tim was about to ask more questions about this “high school” thing he and Kim are about to start.


	3. Greyhound

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Reread the end of the book (will reread the whole book but I needed an immediate refresher); got sad about the kids and how scared they are the whole time; wrote something short and immediately post-canon.

The biggest problem with the world outside, Tim quickly concluded, was the sheer number of  _ people _ . There were more people on the first Greyhound bus out of Marion than Tim and Kim had possibly met in their entire lives, including the few other subjects in the lab sentient enough to be called “people.” There were certainly more people in the city of Marion, though their little party had stuck to the outskirts. An old man snoring on a park bench, covered in rags and unkempt beard. A half-dozen older teenagers alternately chatting aloud and by text as they boarded, whether with each other or not unclear. A woman with bright pink hair and a faded black concert advertising “Def Leppard”, playing music so loudly through her headphones that it could be heard from several rows of seats away.

In other circumstances—no, there were no circumstances Tim could imagine in which he’d be outside the laboratory on a Greyhound bus for the first time ever, leaving the state, and  _ not _ be more terrified than he was curious. But the idea of it lingered. 

He knew, technically, how many people there were, out here. He’d been encouraged to read, and one can only read so much without learning something, even if statistics like global population were more Kim’s area. Kim could likely properly conceive of seven-point-something billion people.

But the people themselves were supposed to be Tim’s area, because humans as a whole communicated mostly via language. And all he could do was sit quietly on the bus, look out the window, and grip Kim’s hand just as hard as she was gripping his. 

Out of the corner of his eye he watched Roger and Dodger, seated in the row ahead of them. They seemed to be having a conversation in the language of facial expressions and minute twitches of their shoulders, which Tim couldn’t translate. Or maybe there were words flowing somewhere he couldn’t hear—who knew what the fully manifest Doctrine of Ethos could do.

As they started to trundle into another city, or at least a town large enough to perhaps have a bus station, Dodger (Math) turned around. Kim said she had killed Leigh, which put her firmly in the top grouping of most dangerous people Tim had ever met. 

“We’re thinking of getting off and getting a car,” she said, carefully as though she was talking to...something she didn’t want to scare. “It’ll be faster and simpler, and we can just drive to the airport in Columbus, and fly home from there.”

_ Home is California, right? _ Tim wanted to ask, because he had been listening, even if he hadn’t quite managed to pull himself together enough to speak to them since leaving the laboratory. But just, now, it was probably for the best—questions could be dangerous. That, he and Kim had learned without reading at all.

“‘Home’ is the Bay Area, California,” said Roger (Language,  _ comforting _ in ways it was difficult to describe, even if he’d killed Reed and thus handily topped the list of dangerous people.) He spoke just enough like he was clarifying that it wasn’t clear whether he was responding as well, to a silent question he might or might not have heard. “We’re not sure exactly where, yet—Berkeley, Palo Alto...you two don’t have to worry about it. We—Dodger and I will figure it out. We won’t hop around for long.”

Questions were dangerous and Tim’s grasp of Californian cities wasn’t strong in the first place; he hadn’t really planned on worrying about that anyway.

They still seemed to be waiting for something. Tim nodded as he wracked his brain, and Kim followed suit with a jerk of her chin.

“That sounds good,” he said finally. Tentatively. “We’ve never been on a plane before, either.”


	4. The Numbers Don't Sing (1)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Um...tw literally existential terror of academic failure, and in general very traumatized teenagers.

It started—well, as established, it started a great many years ago. But that story has already been told.

It started with a calculus problem. Kim and Tim had been enrolled as freshmen in a small private high school, but Kim had been doing a high school freshman’s math since she was seven years old, so each Tuesday and Thursday morning, and Friday afternoons for TA sections, Roger or Dodger drove them to the university and Kim took Advanced Multivariable Calculus. Tim brought a book and read in the seat beside her (they hadn’t needed to discuss it, between themselves—being half a city apart wasn’t acceptable, even for a couple hours. Maybe one day, but not yet.)

One day, the professor wrote a problem on the board, just as usual, and Kim read it carefully through, as usual, and for a moment, she didn’t know how to do it.

Not that she didn’t instantly know the answer—that was fine, that was what doing the math was  _ for _ . Not that she didn’t know all the potential ways to do a multivariable calculus problem—they clustered in the back of her mind, ready to be deployed. But she looked at the problem and she didn’t know which was best for  _ this _ , which steps to start on to tease out the truths of  _ x _ ,  _ y _ , and  _ z _ . 

Before she could so much as inhale, it was over: the steps of the problem unspooled before her, the professor’s explanation clear the second it started; the world settled back into place.

+

The second time, she and Tim were playing an old game: Imagine That. The way it’s played is, you sit together in your room, or clean up bloodstains in the laboratory, or simply lie awake at night because the alternative is having nightmares, and whisper together, too quietly to be overheard (you hope) about where else you might go. What you might do. Who you might or might not be, or be with.

They hadn’t been allowed to play in years. But now...well, they had both looked, and neither had found any cameras or microphones in their new bedroom. Yet the nightmares hadn’t stopped. So…

“Imagine that we go to Disney World,” Tim’s voice was muffled against Kim’s shoulder. The nightmares had been his, tonight. “That’s the one in Florida, with the themed areas for different nations. Forget eighty days—we could go around the world in eighty minutes.”

“Why don’t we just go around the world for real?” 

“Well, there’s something added by the artificiality...like being in a play. But mostly, the efficiency. How long would it take to visit the UK, France, Italy, Germany, China, Japan...Morocco, Norway, the US, Canada, and Mexico?”

“Starting here?”

Tim made a noise of agreement, and Kim hugged him a little tighter as she did the math. “We can’t take advantage of the international date line to cheat subjectively, then, but...assuming direct flights from capital to capital otherwise, with 40-minute layovers, including boarding times...3 days, 7 hours, 22...”

Something was wrong. The numbers weren’t right. Kim frowned. “No, I’m missing…”

She sat bolt upright, nearly dislodging her brother. “Crosswinds!” 

“Kim!” Tim hissed in alarm. He twisted out of her grip to look reflexively at the door.

But nobody came. There was no sound of footsteps. This wasn’t necessarily a good sign.

Kim sank back under their covers. 

“Sorry,” she whispered. “I just...forgot a variable.” She thought it through again. “3 days, 8 hours, and 52 minutes, at this time of year.”

+

The damning third point that defined the trend came when Kim got her second midterm back, at a TA session in late October. It was marked with a red, circled  _ 91% _ . 

(Dodger had sat her down, the day before classes started, and said seriously that she might feel pressured to deliberately make mistakes sometimes, to fit in. Especially as a girl. She’d said that it was a valid option for social integration, if Kim wanted, but also that she shouldn’t feel obligated. It hadn’t occurred to Kim to do any less than her best, either before the conversation or after—since when was failure  _ encouraged? _ )

Her eyes started to blur as she flipped through the exam, right answer after right answer after—there. And there. Two errors—three, four, five when compounded. One was a question that required material they hadn’t learned yet, that was almost—almost—understandable, but the other—it was an  _ arithmetic _ error; she’d added 4 and 6 and gotten  _ 12 _ , and three steps later, the answer was 5e off.

“Kim?” Tim whispered, touching her shoulder gently. The TA was talking as he finished handing back the tests, about how it had been an exam meant to challenge them, the average had been 55% before the curve and that was pretty good, really; they would go over it, now…

Kim reminded herself that she was in California, in a real-life college classroom, with no alchemists for miles, if they had any sense. She raised her hand so fast it would have hurt her shoulder, if she’d been paying attention to that, and said in one hitched breath, “MayIbeexcusedforamomentplease?”

“What–yeah, ‘course.” said the TA, who was named Fred. He gave her a second glance. “Hey, are you—”

Kim was already out of the classroom, red-inked test gripped in one hand, door slamming behind her.

Tim found her 2 minutes and 17 seconds later, in the nearest ladies room, and hesitated another 54 seconds (she counted, and she  _ knew _ she was right) before knocking softly on the stall door and asking, “Can I come in?”

“It’s not really locked,” said Kim, through sniffles that were neither pretty nor clean.

Tim locked the door behind him, because if the lock wasn’t between them, it was okay, and hugged her fiercely around the shoulders. 

“It’ll be okay,” he said. “We’ll make it okay.” And because it was Tim, it wasn’t a promise that could be broken, but it was a promise to try.

“Did I mess up?” Kim asked, already starting to catch her breath. Crying had never been encouraged. “Did I—” She looked up, gripping the test and its incorrect answers until the edges of the paper dug into her palm. “Tim, did I really,  _ really _ screw up? Letting—helping them...giving up the Doctrine?”

“I don’t think so,” Tim said thoughtfully. “I really don’t think so. I mean, just think what...what  _ Leigh _ would have done if you’d asked to be excused.”

He shuddered just slightly, but Kim didn’t. Kim said bleakly, “I can’t feel numbers anymore.”

Tim nearly stepped back in surprise. “You–what?”

“I can’t always tell if they’re right or wrong.” She couldn’t bring herself to look up. She tried to put into words for him. “They don’t... _ sing _ , the way they used to. Not always. And not the same.”

“Kim…”

He sounded dismayed. Unsettled. She smoothed the failed exam flat on her lap (thank goodness the toilet had a lid to sit on.) “Like if someone spelled ‘chief’ with an  _ i _ before the  _ e _ , and you didn’t even notice.”

“...’Chief’  _ is _ spelled with an  _ i _ before the  _ e _ ,” said Tim.

“ _ Exactly _ .” Then she managed to raise her head, and felt tears spilling out of her eyes again. “You feel it too, right? It’s not just me?”

“I…” Now Tim’s eyes slid away from hers. “I’ve been learning Gaelic, you know, and it’s...never taken me this long to get a grip on a new language before. Not even Japanese. I thought it was just...”

But neither of them was very good at lying, not even to each other. 

“We’re losing our intuitive understanding,” he finished quietly. “Ever since June, and the manifestation. I just haven’t wanted to think about it.” 

“Okay,” said Kim, and, “Okay.” She was always more satisfied when there was an right answer. 

She rested her head against his side again. “And this is better?”

“I don’t know,” Tim admitted. He tugged her to her feet. “But I think Fred will come looking for us soon, so...for now, imagine that it is?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fun fact: at first I was going to say they go to a medium-sized public high school, bc it's easier to blend in while being weird in one of those, but then I wrote the chapter and it was like...no. No. They can't handle that yet. 
> 
> (But now they have separate twin beds that they can shove together to be one large bed...)


	5. The Numbers Don't Sing

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Subtitled: Parenting is Hard

Dodger was allegedly working on a press thing for her publisher, and really doodling numbers in the margins defining weather in Palo Alto in 2002, when everyone got home at once. It wasn’t the most unusual thing - Kim and Tim could handle public transit now, and generally did on Tuesdays and Thursdays to get back to school, but Roger was generally done on campus halfway through Friday afternoons, so he drove them home after Kim’s calculus TA section.

They were  _ far _ from the loudest teenagers she’d ever met, but there was still a suspicious lack of noise from the front hall area. So she was already twisting to look when Roger came into her office with a worried expression.

“What’s wrong?” she asked, voice tightening as it went. “Did something happen? Do we need to - ”

(Kim and Tim weren’t the only ones still on edge after the events of the summer. Even the absolute certainty of a universe of mathematics couldn’t always stand against human nerves.)

“Everyone’s fine,” Roger said quickly. “No further alchemical intervention or anything.”

Dodger relaxed.

Roger dropped his backpack on the floor and sat gingerly on the spare chair that served as Dodger’s holder of unwanted papers. “Kim made a couple mistakes on her midterm - Fred said she still got 84% before the curve, but...they’re both pretty shaken up.” 

“Oh...oh!” Dodger abandoned the half-written formulae for wind currents. (It was petty and  _ probably _ irrelevant to the fate of the world, but she was starting from the bottom up.) “That must...suck.”

Roger smiled at her (lack of) wordsmithing, but said quietly, “I can only imagine.”

+

Nobody mentioned it over dinner. They all ate together, because dozens of articles said that was important for a family and Roger and Dodger both had fond memories of it. The time to check in and catch up was nice. Tonight, Roger carried most of the conversation with a mildly funny account of squabbles over tenure in the Spanish department, and Tim made a valiant effort with an update from freshman Biology, which was still providing some distinctly different perspectives on both ethics and anatomy than traditional alchemy. 

Roger had cooked, so he went off to work on a new translation of Ovid while Dodger did dishes, and Kim and Tim went upstairs to do homework. After an appropriate amount of time, she abandoned the pasta pot to soak and followed.

The cookie-cutter Albany house came with a blue paint job, a 15.6ft x 11.9ft yard in the back and 10.2ft x 9.4ft in the front, 3 bed (+ loft) and 2 ½ bath. They’d given Tim and Kim the master bedroom, so they could share and Roger and Dodger didn’t have to (they didn’t really need to, at this point.) 

The door was closed but the light was still on and, and anyway, it wasn’t late at all. Dodger knocked thrice. “Hey, can I come in?”

The very quiet sounds of pencil and laptop keys stopped; blankets shifted and footsteps stepped carefully and Tim opened the door and stood aside as he said, “Yes.”

“Thanks,” said Dodger, and glanced over the room as she entered. It hadn’t changed since yesterday - bookshelves, freakishly neat desks, dressers still starting to be cluttered with knickknacks, and twin beds shoved together to create a shared king-size. Usually, they worked at the desks, but tonight they’d clearly been leaning against each other in the bed; Tim’s laptop lay next to Kim’s history textbook and worksheets, and Kim. 

Kim was sitting criss-cross applesauce, but she scrambled to her feet as Dodger came in, and stood beside Tim like the foot of the bed was the closest they could get to a wall at their backs. She was nearly as pale as her hair, and her expression was neutral but Dodger recognized “desperately hiding a terrified whirlwind” when she saw it in the mirror.

Dodger snagged a desk chair and sat. “I just wanted to check in, see how you guys are doing. I know I’ve said it before, but you know you don’t have to do your homework on Friday night, right? You’ve got two days, and we have Netflix  _ and  _ Hulu! Ever tried Bojack Horseman?”

Someone else might have missed the split second of silent consultation before Tim replied, “We like to get our work done first. But thank you for the suggestion.”

Honestly, passive disagreement was a huge improvement on the skittish obedience of, oh, most of the summer. Dodger resisted the urge to sigh.

“Kim,” she said tentatively, “There’s...more to life than math, I promise - ”

“That’s easy for  _ you _ to say,” Kim spat, coming to life like an icicle catching fire. “You’re the one who  _ stole _ it from me!”

Then she shut her mouth with a horrified snap and Tim took half a step closer to her, and she took half a step in front of him, into a shared, braced pose so clearly practiced that Dodger felt a little less bad about killing Leigh Barrow. 

“Fuck,” she said eloquently, and dropped her chin into her hands. “I’m sorry, I guess I might be the worst person to say that, huh? Even Roger would be better at this particular pep talk.” She gave them a one-sided smile. “Well, Roger is objectively better at any pep talk, but the audience does get a bit..Rogered, huh? So you’re stuck with me for the serious stuff.”

Kim and Tim still both looked like they were facing the firing squad. Dodger sighed.

“What I’m trying to say is...we’re stuck. I mean, we’re really stuck in what we are. But you, you can both be…” She waved a hand. “Anything. Airplane pilots. Astronauts. Acrobats. I can only think of A words right now apparently, sorry.”

She added, “Well, anything you want to be until I figure out how to make all this go  _ right _ , and you get to try again. I’m still being upfront about that. But that’s going to take years, I can already tell so...I don’t know. Join Drama Club? Do a sport? Don’t worry about not getting 100% on a test even if you meant to - but if you want to, I can tutor you. I’ve actually been paid for that, quite a lot.”

“...I’ll think about it,” said Kim, like she wasn’t sure if it was the right answer.

“Great!” Dodger sprang to her feet, and tried to slow her movements when the teenager both very much did not flinch. “Also, obviously, feel your feelings, I’m sure this is terrible and that’s real and valid and all that therapist talk - now that I think of it, we should probably all be in therapy. I used to have a therapist and it was...well, I had to brain him with a toaster, but it was hypothetically good. To talk about things.”

“...Thank you?” said Tim, and now it was more bewilderment than fear.

Dodger decided to take the win. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> do I have to write one from the POV of a very bewildered therapist now


	6. Nine(+) Lives

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I meant to do something _pure_ fluff, but instead I had to share this very important headcanon as to the existential state of Bill the cat.

“Roger.” Dodger entered the living room with Bill the cat in her arms and a perplexed expression on her face. “The cat hasn’t aged in three years.”

“Hmm?” Roger kept working on his half-written crossword puzzle. It was absurd how hard it was to break into the New York Times’ list of accepted submitters.

“We’ve been here for three years,” Dodger said, “and Bill hasn’t aged in that entire time.” Her mouth twisted in irritation. “I can’t even tell when the last time he aged _was_.”

That got Roger’s full attention. “ _You_ can’t tell—”

“ _I_ can’t tell,” Dodger repeated. “Did you...do something?”

“I don’t think so?” He cleared his lap for cat and Dodger passed him over obligingly. 

He certainly looked like the same old Bill, though whether that was counterargument or not was, Roger supposed, part of the argument in the first place. He was orange. Getting tubby with age. Having perfected laziness as an art form, he did little more than _mrrp_ contentedly as he was shifted from one favorite human to another.

_A sideways flash of memory: Bill on a coat in his lap, bleeding and twisted, as Erin took corners at a pace that would have terrified him if he hadn’t been exposed to her driving before. The too-calm thought crept through that it would be incredibly ironic, if they had a car accident on the frantic way to the vet because their cat had been hit by a car._

_“Don’t let him die,” Erin snapped as she blasted through a red light. “Roger, order him to hold on.”_

_“What– how would that—” Blunt force trauma, exsanguination, visible femur, fibula, tibia...words he never thought he’d need to see manifested firsthand..._

_“Just do it!” She turned to face him, which was absolutely_ not _road-safe, and he was unprepared for the rage in her eyes. “I like the stupid cat, okay! Just give me this one goddamn thing!”_

_(Deja vu of Erin shouting at him, blood on his hands, far too much blood…)_

_“Don’t die,” Roger whispered intently, bent over and petting Bill’s forehead with two careful fingers. “Bill, this is an order. This is a command. This is an adjuration. Just keep on not dying.”_

He blinked and he was on a sofa in Albany in 2019 and it was Dodger in front of him, and a universe described and defined by language rotating comfortably around him. Bill _mrrp_ ed again and butted his hand.

Like any well-trained cat owner, Roger scratched the preferred forehead spot. “No, actually, I remember—that was me. If it stuck across timelines…” He winced guiltily. “He may just be immortal, now.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Also I love Erin _so much_.


	7. Shark

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Uh...tw alcohol, objectification of women, stereotypical terrible frat bros.

Brad was having a pretty good night. The beer was good, the Bears had won, and Dave had stayed gone out with his prissy girlfriend instead of with the rest of the frat, which meant Brad didn’t need to hear about her newest fucking diet or the new car Dave was going to get for their one-year anniversary. Thought he was such a bigshot, with his girlfriend and his car and his shiny new  _ Laboratory Assistant _ job. Looking down on the rest of them for going out for a few drinks after a game.

The waitresses at the bar weren’t slouches, either. Brad wasn’t sure where exactly they’d ended up - it had beer and booths and a pool table, which they’d taken over, and that was all that mattered...except the asses of the girls bringing drinks. He copped a feel as one passed by with a foofy blue drink for Ron - nice. She smacked his hand but her stare was hot.

“That’s a foofy drink,” he told Ron. He poked him with a pool cue and waved an IPA in his face. “Get a real drink, nerd.”

“Dude, foofy drinks have, like, three times more booze than beer,” said Ron, shoving him back. The drink sloshed, and he raised it above his head. “And it’s blue. Bears!”

“BEARS!” the rest of the guys roared back, louder than the rest of the bar combined. They tossed back their drinks as one. Some of Brad’s and Chuck’s and Tommy’s splashed onto the floor, but, whatever! It was just beer.

“Hey, babe!” Brad waved at a blond waitress with a nice rack. “Another round!”

“Hey!” A totally different chick cut in, smiling brightly. “Can I get in on your pool game? It looks sooo fun.”

She was older, though not that much, and with enough curves and bright red hair to make up for it. Brad gestured magnanimously with his empty beer. “Sure. Chuck, give the lady your stick.”

A couple guys snickered, which, heh. Stick. But he’d said lady, so it was  _ classy _ , and the chick didn’t even seem to notice.

“But I’m winning!” Chuck complained. “You just don’t want to buy the next round!”

“Oh, you’re making bets?” said the redhead. Her eyes widened and she stepped back. “Gee, maybe I shouldn’t join in - I haven’t really played pool before.”

“Aw, I’ll go easy on you.” Brad only leered a little, because again: it was always better to be classy at first. (And  _ while _ four...five...a bunch of beers in. Take that, Dave!)

“I’ll wait for you to win this game, at least,” she demurred with another sweet smile. Chuck cupped his hands over his mouth and booed, and so did Ron, foof-drinking loser. Brad just grinned, and made sure to flex a little as he put his drink down and set up his next shot.

And he did win, so take fucking  _ that _ , Chuck. While his back was turned, another guy had joined the group to talk to the redhead, but he looked like her brother, and a reedy, English adjunct-professor–type to boot. With a foofy  _ pink _ drink. So whatever.

“Ready for your turn?” Brad asked, and grabbed her arm to pull her to the table. “I’ll show you how a real man plays.”

“All right!” she chirped, and the way her hip caught on the table, she was a couple drinks in herself. Hot. “So, we’re making a bet over it, right?”

Brad almost, like an idiot, said she didn’t have to, but then his good sense caught up with him.

“Hell yeah,” he said, and this time he didn’t bother to hide his leer. “If I win, you gotta ditch your nerd and come drink with us.”

“Sure!” Her eyes took on a competitive glint, which was the first warning sign. “And if I win, you guys all go drink somewhere else, or maybe just go the fuck home.”

“What?” Brad was caught flat-footed, with one hand shoving all the balls into the triangle.

“I said, if I win, you go. Got it?” She gave another sugary-sweet smile, but this time, Brad could recognize the frigid bitch in it. “Don’t worry, I really have never played before.”

Brad slammed the triangle down around the balls. The whole table jumped. He whipped it off just as hard.

“Fine,” he snarled. “Shoot.”

“Solids,” she said, and lined up her shot like it didn’t even matter.

They went in in order, one to eight. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> me, wide-eyed, with monocular vision since before I can remember: Perfect spacial awareness is the _coolest_ superpower.
> 
> (These scene ends with either a) a bunch of frat bros awkwardly shuffling out of the bar, or b) Dodger beating up a bunch of frat bros with a pool cue, while Roger sips his drink and watches because she's having fun.


	8. Ocean

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Today completely got away from me, though on the other hand, my house now contains SO MUCH Passover food, AND most of the dishes from it are clean. So there. Please enjoy this second thing I actually wrote months ago; there goes my entire buffer whoops.

“Immense. Boundless. Awesome,” Tim whispered as he stood on a beach in Marin, California and looks at the ocean for the first time. “Abyssal. Vast.” 

It wasn’t like they’d never gone outside, and the sky in rural Ohio is plenty all-encompassing. But that was the sky, far above, and here, Tim could run down and splash in the water, if he wanted. Yet still it was…

“Infinite.” The waves rolled in and out, specked with foam and sunlight. “Hypnotic. Incandescent. Azure, cerulean, cobalt…” He didn’t know enough shades of blue. “Astronomical…”

“It’s really fucking big,” said Kim. She stood beside him, one hand in his; with the other she shaded her eyes and squinted at the water. 

“Kim!” he hissed, and reflexively looked around for chastisement. But no one was looking at them—the beach wasn’t empty; it was the middle of summer and the sand was scattered with ordinary people who weren’t created with alchemy, who didn’t even know it existed. More relevantly, and closer by, Dodger poked at a tide pool while Roger looked on from the pile of towels they’d brought. But nobody was paying any particular attention to the two teenagers standing on a rock, looking at the sea.

“I’m pretty sure we can swear, out here,” Kim said gently.

Then, because she was Kim and her two modes were all and nothing, she hollered down, “Are we allowed to swear? Curse words?”

For all her bravado, her hand tightened around Tim’s for the moment before Dodger called back, “Say whatever the hell you want!”

She was holding a crab in one hand. Roger added an absent-minded thumbs up, still watching his sister and the sea. His lips moved silently, and Tim fancied he was doing the same thing Tim had been, to more effect.

Tim still wasn’t sure how he felt about that. About…any of this. California. People who didn’t know alchemy even existed. Roger and Dodger and what they were, and he and Kim weren’t.

But he was standing within reach of the ocean, with Kim, and it was bigger than he had words for.


	9. Nightmares

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wrote this between 2 and 4am and frankly you can probably tell.

In their new house, in their new town (their first town), in the new world at the surprisingly quiet end of the Improbable Road, Kim and Tim’s bedroom was closer to both kitchen and one of the bathrooms than either Roger’s or Dodger’s was. In fact, Tim and Kim didn’t have to pass either of the other bedrooms in order to go much of anywhere in the house. This was good, because it meant that when they had nightmares, they could slip out of bed with relatively little fear of being caught, so long as they were quiet, and go for the toilet or a glass of water.

Eventually, of course. At first, they mostly just huddled together in the twin beds they’d shoved as close together as possible. For the vast majority of the human populace, the advent of the Impossible City had been a complete non-event. For Tim and Kim, the world had, in fact, changed utterly.

Tonight, though, they were a little bold. The habit had started to creep in, with encouragement from their new guardians and a lack of reprisal for hesitantly obeying. So when Tim woke up with a muffled shout on his lips, he managed to let go of Kim after just a few moments, and said without his voice shaking even a little that he was going to go to the bathroom.

Kim pushed her sheets off as well. She wasn’t going to go back to sleep until he did anyway. “I’m going to get some apple cider. Want some?”

“Thanks,” said Tim, with a flicker of a smile. They padded silently through the door together before splitting up.

The kitchen was arranged such that it was possible to enter the door next to the refrigerator and not be seen by anyone else in the room until you stepped beyond it. But voices carried around the corner just fine. So when Kim entered and heard voices, she pressed herself against the side of the fridge without a thought.

“ - and they were _burning_.” Dodger’s voice was choked, and quiet. Not in the way of someone trying not to be heard, but rather someone speaking words they weren’t sure they wanted to be aloud at all. Were the laws of physics being fully obeyed, Kim would have heard it before she’d entered the kitchen, and seen the radius of light from the stove.

“And she kept laughing, and I was looking for water but I couldn’t find it - it wasn’t where it was supposed to be. And when I finally did, I was so mad that I didn’t even try to save my parents - ”

“That’s not how it went,” Roger said firmly, and it wasn’t the reality-shaping words of Language; it was just a brother reassuring his sister. There was a shuffle of cloth like a gentle hug. “It was just a dream, Dodger. And we’ll do it _right_ , next time - ”

“I know that.” Dodger’s voice sharpened, and then cracked again. “But she _dissolved_ , Roger. She was still laughing at me, but it was also screaming, and she just...dissolved - ”

“Truly?”

Kim jumped. She’d closed her eyes, like she could stop intruding on this moment clearly not meant for her, even as she listened with all her might. She hadn’t noticed her brother’s approach at all. 

Tim didn’t hide behind the fridge. Tim had crept into the room proper, just barely lit as it was by the light over the stove. 

Kim followed, of course. The manifested Doctrine of Ethos shared the wide window seat beside the stove, in their pajamas. Dodger’s head leaned on Roger’s shoulder, his arm wrapped around her waist, and they both held cups of what smelled like chocolate. A small pan on the stove was being warmed at the lowest setting.

“What?” said Dodger, raising her head in confusion.

“Can you confirm that?” Tim asked, and still his voice was steady. “That Leigh - I assume you mean Leigh - ” Now it cracked. “She’s dead - she’s destroyed, obliterated, gone for good - it was alkahest, and she can’t possibly come back - ”

“Yes.” Roger and Dodger spoke together and this time it was Absolute Fact, confirmed in word and number.

Tim let out a shaky sigh, and Kim felt something unspool in her chest as well, as she took his hand without a thought. 

“Nightmares, huh?” said Dodger, with a twist of a smile that made it commiserating rather than interrogating.

Roger distangled himself from her and went to the pot on the stove, declaring, “That means we need more hot chocolate, I think. Traditional, non-alchemical treatment for terror-based insomnia. Kim, can you get more milk from the fridge?”

Tim gave a small smile. Kim got the milk. As she handed it over, however, she tucked her hair behind her ear and said, “I was thinking about apple cider, actually. Can we heat that up, too? Maybe with cinnamon?”

“Ooh, let’s have cinnamon in the cocoa, too,” said Dodger. There were tear tracks on her face, but she the rest of her usual fierceness seemed to have returned. “Good call, Kim.”

Kim returned a slight smile of her own.

It was an improbably, impossibly, brave new world.


	10. Two Truths and a Lie

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> me: It'll be fun to write more external POV. This time: high school!  
> me: oh right, high school students are _exclusively_ self-centered  
> me: bless their hearts

Jenny Smith walked into first period freshman English with pink hair, a new binder, and a great deal of determination. New school? No problem! No friends? _Yet_ , was the key word. Rossmoor was a small private high school, no natural feeder like public schools - everyone was new. No one knew her from middle school - no reputation to drag along of timidity, “teacher’s pet”, and reading alone in the library each lunch. She’d _dyed her hair_ , _without_ permission. She was fourteen and it was time to be a cool rebel with tons of cool friends.

(The fact that her dad had been supportive, if surprised, at her new hair, and her mom had barely seemed to notice was...disappointing as a start, but typical, really.)

By fifth period Health and Society, Jenny's determination had deflated a little. She’d forgotten how boring first days of school were - her new binder was filling with syllabi and permission slips, all saying the same things. She was aching for lunch, but the magic of the pink hair didn’t seem to be working: she didn’t have anyone to sit with yet, much less anyone really cool. Many of them _did_ seem to know each other after all - all from a couple different private middle schools, rather than public like Jenny. Time was running out and she knew, deep in her heart, that if she ended up in the library at lunch on her first day, that would be it for good. Four more years of eating alone.

“Alright, before we go over the syllabus, let’s get to know each other!” said Ms. Yang, who seemed like the sort of teacher who really believed in the importance of this. “Does everyone know the game Two Truths and a Lie?”

Jenny wanted to put her head on her desk and groan. Unfortunately, the classes weren’t big enough for there to be a real back to lurk in, coolly apathetic and unseen by the teacher at the front.

A pair of students in front of her started whispering as Ms. Yang explained the party game. They had the same last name and the air of co-conspirators, so Jenny thought they were probably twins, though it was harder to tell from the back. The boy was kind of bland-looking, while the girl had hair that was probably _professionally_ dyed, bleached as pale as sun and tinted so faintly green that Jenny thought maybe she was imagining it. 

Hey - conversation-starter! 

“I like your hair,” Jenny said, as they all formed up into a circle under Ms. Yang’s instruction. “It’s all about being who you really are, right?”

The girl eyed her warily. “It is my hair.” 

“Right! That’s why I just dyed mine, didn’t even wait for my parents - ”

“Alright,” Ms. Yang repeated, “say your name - whatever you’d like to be called in class, and remember, you can always change it later! Then two truths and a lie, and we’ll all vote on which we think is which, and then you reveal it. I’ll start…”

Jenny paid attention, of course, and panicked internally over how exactly to make this first impression. What truths to give? Standard facts, birthday and favorite color? More personal, like favorite song? What was everyone else doing? How could she make up a believable lie on the spot - or _should_ it be believable; should she say something obviously fake for a laugh, or to show that she was too cool for this? Oh, she was failing the attitude thing already - she tried to remember to slouch.

“You can call me Tim,” said the boring-looking twin, two people before her. His hands twisted around the hem of his shirt. “My favorite word today is xylophone, I recently moved here from Iowa, and I’ve caught seven Vulpix in Pokemon GO thus far.”

Jenny absentmindedly voted for Vulpix - xylophone was too weird to be a lie and Iowa, well, who knew. Fifty/fifty chance. She was wrong - apparently it was Ohio. 

“I’m Kim.” Oh god, Jenny was next. “I don’t have a favorite color, I’ve caught _eight_ Vulpix in Pokemon GO - ” Well, that was way too genuinely smug not to be a truth - “And…” Her eyes flicked sideways to Jenny. “This is my natural hair color.”

Most of the class voted on the last one as the lie. Too surprised to dissent, or move earlier, so did Jenny.

Kim smiled like a cat that’d gotten the cream. “Mostly wrong - I have _nine_ Vulpix.”

Tim scowled, and Jenny couldn’t help but snicker, along with several other people.

She said something about her favorite color (pink, obvious truth) and book (World War Z, truth) and pet dog (lie - she had a cat named Snickers), and put everything back in her backpack five minutes before the bell rang so she could be ready to stand and linger by Kim’s desk as the twins packed up. 

“That’s cool, too, that it’s your natural hair,” she said. “I wish I had hair that pale - mine’s brown, naturally. I had to bleach it so hard to get the dye in.”

Both their eyes flicked up to her hair, and Jenny could tell, she could just _tell_ that they were thinking something like, _Obviously, and you didn’t even do a good job._ Jenny fought the urge to put on her sweatshirt and flip up the hood, or maybe just walk away very fast. Nothing wrong with spending lunch in the library for four more years. Eventually she’d go to college and try again. It wasn’t her _fault_ , okay, there were streaks and roots everywhere but she’d done it alone on a Sunday as fast as possible while she had the house to herself, and YouTube tutorials didn’t say what to do when your sink wasn’t the right size or your cat kept attacking her reflection in the mirrors you’d propped up to see the back of your head - 

“It looks a little like Neapolitan ice cream,” Tim said thoughtfully. “Predominantly strawberry. Or if a maple tree bled pink.” He blinked. “Kind of hardcore.”

Jenny adjusted her backpack strap self-consciously. But it felt like a compliment, so she asked without rancor, “What’s special about ‘xylophone’?”

Kim bristled defensively, but Tim just shrugged. “I was feeling Greek.”

They exchanged some sort of look as they picked up their backpacks. Then Kim turned back to Jenny and asked, weirdly formally, “Would you like to eat lunch with us? We have sandwiches from home, but our cousin gave us some money for vending machine deserts, and we were thinking of trying those mint chocolate things.”

“Junior Mints,” Tim offered. 

“You’ve never had Junior Mints?” Jenny asked, now frankly fascinated. “I mean, yet - but you’ve never had Junior Mints?”

“It was _really_ rural Ohio,” Tim said quickly, and started walking. “And we were homeschooled. There wasn't a lot of candy.”

Kim nodded in solemn agreement. 

Okay, so, not cool rebels with dyed hair - but interesting prospects, and not eating alone then going to the library, either. (Honestly, homeschool in rural Ohio probably explained a lot of the awkwardness.)

Jenny adjusted her backpack straps again and sped up a couple steps to take the lead. 

“Then I’ll have to introduce you to the wonders of urban high school,” she declared. “First stop: seeing if the vending machine has giant York patties, which are actually better than Junior Mints.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Important facts:  
> \- per the real-life timeline, Pokemon GO did, in fact, come out within about a month of the manifestation of the Doctrine of Ethos. I can only assume that Dodger's favorite pokemon are the Porygon/Porygon2/Porygon-Z line  
> \- Kim and Tim's new legal last name is Cheswich, bc Roger's parents don't deserve grandchildren


	11. Dye

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is about April 2019 probably, the twins' junior year of high school.

“Pads, pads…” Kim dug through the bathroom closet. “Oh- ! No.” She put an empty  _ Always _ packet wrapper to the side, beside three open, half-used packs of razors; six stolen bottles of hotel shampoo and seven of conditioner. There was a bin at the back; she tugged it forward without much hope - 

“Oh my god, Jenny, you have  _ so much _ hair dye!”

“Agh, no!” her friend yelped from the bedroom. “That’s my freshman shame box! No, look in the - ”

“I want to see the shame box!” called Aimee, also from the bedroom. “Bring it out, Kim!”

“Shame box! Shame box!” chorused Blue and Heather, with the sound of pounding on the floor.

Laughing, Kim finagled the plastic tub out of the back of the closet, just barely managing to knock all the hair condiments out in the process. She held it triumphantly over her head as she re-entered the bedroom full of the other members of Berkeley Women’s Rowers, Teenage Dream Team (self-named). It was heavy, but she’d been doing oar training for a year and a half now. 

“Freshman shame box!”

Everyone cheered except Jenny, who groaned, “Noooo,” and reached up dramatically the floor. She didn’t get up, though, mostly because Blue was sitting on her legs.

“And pads?” Heather asked hopefully. She was on the bed, hugging a pillow in the universal posture of  _ I don’t have cramps now but I might later. _

Kim shook her head. “None.”

“Damn - my mom should have some.” said Jenny, grabbing Blue’s shoulder for leverage in sitting up. “In her bathroom - ”

“Just take one of my spares,” said Aimee, who was the sort who could pull anything needed out of her purse. She reached for it now, produced an orange pad and frisbee-threw it across the room.

Heather caught it gratefully, and abandoned her pillow on the bed. 

“Wait for me,” she called over her shoulder as she headed to the bathroom. “I want to hear all about Jen’s embarrassing freshman hair choices!”

“Nooo,” Jenny moaned again, draping herself over Blue’s shoulder. “Kim, We’ve talked about this. You swore an oath. You’ve kept it for nearly two years now.” Her eyes were wide and pleading through naturally dark brown bangs. “Don’t betray me now.”

Blue patted her arm sympathetically, and mouthed,  _ Betray her _ to Kim.

“Per my sacred oath, I shall share neither descriptions nor photographs,” Kim said solemnly, as she sat on the floor and started unpacking the hair dye. “Nor even a complex algebraic equation that, if mapped, would describe the wave you tried in April 2017.” 

Aimee’s eyes gleamed, and Blue didn’t try to hide their snicker.

Kim finished laying out her treasure trove. “I will, however, point out that you have 28 tubes of dye, almost but not all of them opened, covering 26 different shades of every color except orange, and two full bottles of bleach.”

“What’s wrong with orange?” Aimee asked, leaning forward for a better look.

Jenny shrugged. “Just don’t like it.”

But for all her protests, she leaned forward with a glint of pride in her eyes. “You know, it really is a shame to leave this all to rot in my bathroom closet.”

“Does hair dye rot?” Blue wondered. 

“Probably.” Jenny waved the interruption away. “My point is…” She looked around like a general, pride shifting to ambition. “It  _ is _ the Marina Games next weekend, and this brainstorming sleepover has failed so far to figure out how best to show off. But I’ve got a lot of both blues and pinks…and we have all night...”

“...we wouldn’t even need to bleach Kim’s hair,” Blue said thoughtfully.

“Ha! Captain’s agreement!” Jenny crowed, and hugged them from behind.

“Wait, we’re dying Kim’s hair?” asked Heather, walking back into the room. “I thought we were making fun of Jenny. What’d I miss?”

“Brainstorming for the Marina Games,” said Aimee, fishing through her bag again. She pulled out two small combs and a handful of hair ties. “Will these help? If we want to separate it for streaks?”

“Hey, I have  _ not _ agreed to this!” Kim protested, and for a moment, it was real. Bodily autonomy was still kind of...a thing.

“Oh, please?” asked Jenny, with those wide, pleading eyes again. “Please please, for a good cause? You were right to not let me in, like, the fall of freshman year, but I really did get better by the end.”

Heather swooped down and grabbed one of the bleach bottles, shook it and pointed it menacingly at Jenny. 

“Are you ready to put your bangs where your mouth is?” she demanded. “There’s no ‘i’ in Teenage Dream - pink and blue streaks for all.”

“For all who want to,” Blue said, captainly. They leaned forward and picked up the second bottle of bleach with a sharp grin. “I’m in.”

“My bangs get into my mouth all the time anyway,” Jenny declared. “I should probably get them cut soon. I’m in.”

Aimee snapped five hair ties around her wrist at once, including one that a moment ago had tied back her ponytail. “I’m in.”

Heather plopped down beside her. “I’ve always wanted to dye my hair. How does this work?”

Kim sighed, but she was grinning. “If I remember from things I’m oath-bound not to tell you about, it involves about four hours of keeping your hair in a bag. And first,  _ you _ all need to bleach.” 

She started undoing the pale braid that reached halfway down her back. She’d tried short hair once, in sophomore year, and immediately grown the familiar weight back out. 

“While you do that, I call dibs on the rose and aquamarine.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm not sure whether Kim or Jenny decided to try rowing and tugged the other along, but that's what happened. The other three all go to different high schools. Kim likes crew for a lot of reasons, but in the beginning the reason she stuck with it was that the steady of rhythm of oars, particularly when many people were coordinated about it at once, reminded her of the steady numerical heartbeat of reality that she couldn't quite feel in her blood anymore. It still does.


	12. D&D

Tim checked his notes, his maps and other props, his copies of all the character sheets, and his Player’s Handbook and Monster Manual, both open to the soonest-likely-relevant pages. Everyone else’s copies of their character sheets were laid out around the table, along with dice - all four sets that Tim owned, just enough for Roger, Dodger, Kim and himself. The Dungeon Master’s Guide PDF was open on his laptop, along with yet more elaborate notes. They were probably too much for just a practice oneshot, but well...he’d been thinking about it for a while. Better safe than sorry.

He rechecked everything as everyone else sorted out the pizza and settled around the dining room table, and Kim brought him a couple slices because she was the best sister. It occurred to him at this last chance to turn back that, while using his family as a test run for his first time DMing was definitely a better, safer, and substantially less terrifying plan than asking anyone in the actual school D&D club, maybe using three players who had about one new player’s worth of experience between them was  _ not _ .

Okay, that wasn’t fair - Kim had been to almost as many RPG sessions as he had, over the past six months. But she’d gotten caught up in the Pathfinder game rather than D&D itself, and Dodger had played “a couple pick-me-up games in college”, and Roger was completely new…

“So, we start in an inn, right?” Dodger asked from across the table, a slice of pepperoni pizza in one hand and Tim took a deep breath and tried to channel several different podcasting LP professionals at once.

“Yes, you’re in an inn - the Soaring Gryphon.” He glanced down at his notes, but he’d memorized them days ago. “It’s bustling, in this evening hour. It’s not the nicest inn in town, but it’s clean enough, and the beer is good. There’s a low fire in the fireplace with the eponymous stuffed gryphon head over the mantle. And it’s a place where patrons and servers alike don’t ask a lot of questions, which is why you’re here. 

“You’re all mercenary adventurers, based in this town of Barnheim. None of you are particularly famous - only level three - ” the level at which most classes got unique enough to be worth playing - “but you’re big enough locally to know each other by reputation, though nothing else.” It’d seemed too complicated to set up inter-party relationships in advance. He’d have enough to do managing all the mechanics.

Tim brought the character sheets to the top of his note pile. “Why don’t you all go around and describe what the others are seeing, of your characters, and what they might know? A couple sentences will do.”

There was a moment of silent, questioning glancing around before he blurted, “Kim, you go first.”

Kim leaned back in her chair, adopting the posture of a hunched, cloaked figure in the shadows. “I’m a Rogue, a trained Assassin. Her name is Darkfeather - that  _ you _ know. Nobody really knows her real name. She’s a mysterious aarakocra - a bird person, probably crow but most people don’t get to see more than black feathers, and a black cloak and her knife.”

She gestured with a butter knife, which she’d definitely brought to the table for this specific purpose because it wasn’t like they needed it to eat pizza.

“Okay!” said Tim, and put Darkfeather’s page behind the others. “Dodger?”

“You see before you a dwarvish woman,” Dodger intoned, with a spark of mischief in her eyes, “in a chainmail bikini and a long fur robe over it, because that’s not actually warm enough for - oh.” Her voice rose to a normal register. “Can we say the weather, or is that you?”

“Um…” Tim glanced at his notes just to be sure. “Any weather is fine.”

“Great.” Dodger dropped into a storyteller's voice again. “A dwarvish woman, etc cetera, known as Kona the Sorceress. Which she is - Wild Magic, if we’re saying that? She comes from a mighty warrior people, thus the bikini, but she happens to be a natural channeler of chaotic energy.”

“Does she have some sort of reputation?” Tim prompted. They’d been over this, actually, in character creation.

Dodger puffed out her chest. “A mighty warrior, and maker of magical explosions! But not stupid - a very good tactician. She defeated the, uh…” She glanced down at her character sheet. “ - Dragon of Black Rock, single-handedly, even though it was a clever bastard.”

“Great!” said Tim, shuffled his sheets again and turned clockwise. “And…”

“An elderly half-elf Druid, known as Mossflower Roe,” and where Dodger tried to narrate and Kim did something approximating roleplay, Roger’s voice turned creaky with age, his back hunched. “With rough, tanned skin and twigs in my grey hair, I’ve been around decades longer than you whippersnappers. Why, I was here when old Redbeard killed that gryphon!” 

He pointed and they turned to look and there was, indeed, a gryphon head mounted over a fireplace that hadn’t been there a moment ago. Its feathers were faded with age and dust, but the yellow glass beads that served as its eyes were uncomfortably lifelike.

Quiet bustle filled the inn shaping around the mercenaries, Darkfeather in her cloak and Kona with her sword and an indistinct fourth figure, as Mossflower continued. “I live out in the forest at the edge of town, in a hut built into a living tree. I’m often seen with the local elk herd - as a half-elf or an elk!” For a moment, broad antlers appeared from his bushy, be-twigged hair, and fresh, green air cut through the smokey inn. “But mostly, I make - oh, fuck, sorry.”

The illusion shattered, or perhaps reality itself snapped back into place, to reveal Roger rubbing his arm, where Kona - Dodger had just elbowed him sharply.

“Sorry,” he repeatedly sheepishly. “Didn’t mean to steal your thunder, Tim.”

There was one of those very split seconds, so fast there’s no conscious thought at all, in which Tim had a choice: raging, bitter jealousy and aching loss, for something that could have, would have,  _ should have _ been his...or abject glee.

They hadn’t been in an alchemist’s laboratory in well over a year and a half. He jumped out of his seat with a grin. “Are you kidding? That was awesome! Can you keep it up? For others’ speech as well?”

“I expect so,” Roger said thoughtfully. “Start telling the story.”

Tim grabbed a paper from his pile and stepped around the back of his chair, so he could approach again with a stiff mien and his hands clasped behind his back.

“As you’re gathered,” he said, “drinks in hand and starting to introduce yourselves to one another, you’re approached by a wizened man in red wizard’s robes - you recognize the gown of a graduate of the Royal Arcane Academy.” 

Roger mouthed a few of the words along with him, and the Soaring Gryphon took shape around them once more. The light was dimmer than the dining room; the scent of roast mutton replaced that of pepperoni pizza. Tim looked down to see a long, thin beard hanging from his chin, over red robes with swisting gold embroidery.

He placed the job notice on the table between the three mercenaries. It had turned more soft and yellowed than fresh printer paper, but the text was easy to read:  _ Weretiger Fang-Hunters Wanted, 75 gold per fresh fang _ . 

“I assume you are all here for this little task of mine?” he asked in a reedy voice. 

(Last last  _ last _ chance to back out...)

“I knew we’d end up LARPing eventually,” Darkfeather sighed from the shadows, tossing and catching a dagger ( _probably_ a d20 rather than a butter knife.) 

Mossflower winked, notable as his eyebrows were also grey, bushy, and slightly twiggy. Kona laughed the proud and hearty laugh of a semi-barbarian sorceress and leaned forward.

“Buddy,” she said with a feral grin, “We’re all here for whatever you've got for us.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **me, making up PCs:** the Math people are both going to just want to hit stuff, so, melee probably. Kim is a rogue, Dodger...fighter? What's the mathiest class, really...well, a sorcerer's metamagic - yeah, sure I've seen sorcerers tank. Hm, should I consider another magic-using melee-capable class - warlock -   
> **me:** oh, _none_ of these people will play a character whose power comes from someone else. Yeah, no. Okay so no cleric either, then.


	13. Happy 4/13, Ya Filthy Animals

The Renaissance Faire was very crowded.

Three years, three months, and some number of days and hours since they’d left James Reed dead underground and ventured into the rest of the world - Kim probably knew the exact time - and Tim was pretty sure that there were far too many  _ people _ up here for anyone to really enjoy. A few at a time was fine; a whole city’s worth was even okay, because who could conceptualize a whole city’s worth of people? Truly conceptualize,  _ understand _ , tens or hundreds of thousands of separate lives?

It was a little fun to try, actually, but it was impossible for a standard human to succeed, and that’s more or less what Tim and Kim were, three years, three months, and some days on. Human.

But Tim still really didn’t like crowds. There were just...too many gazes, impossible to ignore. Too many unknown opinions and agendas, hidden like knives in pockets. Too much jostling, which still made him jump some days.

That said, the Ren Faire was probably worth it. Shops and stands sold everything from sweetmeat pies to fresh-blown glass to entire swords. There were archery contests and axe-throwing lessons. And as for the crowd, well, at least they were interesting to look at. Some people were dressed in modern jeans and t-shirts, but many more wore clothing ranging in style from about 500 CE to 1945. He had definitely seen a World War II pilot. The average seemed to settle around the eighteenth century, or whatever of the eighteenth century could be approximated by the back of a person’s closet. 

Tim kind of hoped they at least  _ knew _ that wasn’t Renaissance garb, even if the enthusiasm made up for the inaccuracy. And who was he to talk, really, in jeans and a t-shirt. 

And then there were the people who dressed up fully but with no intention at all of fitting into the era. Tim tapped Noah on the shoulder, bastion of pop culture knowledge that he was, and pointed to a pair of obvious cosplayers.

“What are those, with the grey paint and horns? No actual mythical creature that I know, unless it’s  _ truly _ bad cosplay.” 

Halfway across the millinery, Serena’s head whipped up from the rack of feathers she’d been examining, so fast that her ponytail swung around and smacked her in the cheek. She didn’t seem to notice; her gaze darted to the cosplayers and back to Tim.

“Tim!” she cried as though struck by revelation. “You were raised in Nowheresville, Ohio!”

“Yes?” he said, perplexed.

Sernea advanced with a wide grin. “And you were homeschooled. With, like, bullshit-restricted internet access. Until after April, 2016”

“Yes,” Tim said more cautiously. But he’d gotten comfortable with that not-quite-lie over the years.

“So it’s genuinely possible that you’ve  _ never _ heard of Homestuck?”

“Oh no,” Noah said quietly beside him.

Tim’s curiosity was too piqued to pay attention to him. He trawled his memory, mostly the parts sourced by Tumblr and Wikipedia.

“I might have?” He frowned. “Something about a mayor?”

“Yes! The Mayor’s  _ objectively _ the best!” Serena literally clapped her hands with glee. “Okay, okay.” She took a deep breath. “So, let me...”

“Oh no,” Noah repeated, with non-genuine despair in his voice.

“...tell you...”

“I will dock you inspiration points,” Noah threatened. “I will call upon the powers granted me as DM to give you disadvantage on every attack for the next three sessions.”

“...about...”

Her grin was fiendishly bright. Tim thought he had probably fallen into a trap - but not a literally dangerous one.

Serena finished, or began: “... _ Homestuck _ .”

\- - - - - - - -

Tim got home too late for dinner that night, but the next night, of course, he ended up describing everything. “ - oh, and Serena spent an hour expounding on the virtues and disappointing ending of a webcomic called Homestuck, so I might check that out or I might not - “

“It was alright,” said Dodger. The rest of them were still eating; she’d had an Idea, finished in three minutes and returned to the whiteboard that took up the spare wall space between the oven and the kitchen door. 

Without missing a moment of scribbling formulae, she jerked a thumb at Roger. “Lord of Space.” At herself: “Muse of Time.”

At the gaping silence from her family, she looked up, annoyed. “What? I had seven years and not a lot of non-professional social interaction. I had to do  _ something _ fun other than math.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Anyone who draws Roger and Dodger in godtier outfits gets SO many prizes.


	14. Nicknames

Roger plays word games in his sleep, literally, he has woken Dodger up by snapping out of a dream and shouting the answer to a crossword puzzle so adamantly that she heard it across the country. It’s not any surprise that Tim is much the same.

But somehow, Tim’s favorite games often leave her even more baffled than Roger’s.

“Brynhildr, would you please pass me the pepper?”

Tim was looking at her. Dodger took her bite of mashed potatoes and used the fork to gesture at herself. “Me?”

His eyes skittered away. “I’m sorry. Dodger, would you please pass me the pepper?”

“That’s a new one,” Dodger said as she handed him the pepper, encouragingly casual. “How’d I end up with a nickname like ‘Brynhildr’?” 

Tim still avoided eye contact as he took the pepper, and straightened like he was answering a test question. “ _Dodger_ being one who dodges, or a truant. _Truant_ is semi-homophonous with _tree-ent_ , originated by Tolkien, known also for his poetic retelling of the tale of Sigurd and Gudrun, which features the valkyrie Brynhildr.”

Dodger blinked.

“She’s often depicted with red hair,” Tim added, looking guilty for having fun. “So it fits together well.”

“Okay,” siad Dodger, and took another bite of mashed potato. (Thank god she had prior experience with academically brilliant but socially disastrous teenagers.) “I can roll with being a famous valkyrie.”

+

“Swivel, give me back my pen or so help me Trismegistus I will - ”

The snarl of fraternal indignation carried through the house, cut off by the distinct sound of someone being smacked by a pillow. 

Dodger shot a questioning look at Roger, who was sitting on her bed, grading Aeneid translations. 

“Kim to Kim Possible to impossible, Impossible City, city, urban, urbanity, suave, swivel,” he explained, pausing his marking-up to tap his pencil against his lap desk. “With an implication of betrayal from _swivel_ ’s relation to turning. Trimestigus is a variant of Hermes associated with alchemical mythology.”

The sounds of a pillow fight increased, with no clear winner. Dodger snorted, and returned to her calculations on the whiteboard-wall. “Well, they’re perfectly normal siblings, at any rate.”

x

“Ooh, Borges! Thanks, Calcaneus!” Tim called as he picked up the library book Roger had left for him on the kitchen table, and raced off to his bedroom with it.

Dodger paused halfway through a sudoku and stared into space (they had never been challenging in the first place; it was still fun to put all the numbers in place.)

“Middleton, ‘o’, oscar - NATO phonetic code - Issac, Jacob, heel, calcaneus,” Kim said absentmindedly as she rooted around the fridge. “Ooh, there’s still pasta!”

She emerged triumphant with her leftovers, and met Dodger’s baffled disbelief.

“It’s not about understanding the words,” Kim said with a shrug. “It’s about understanding Tim.”

=

“Mornin’, twenty-three–forty,” Dodger said cheerfully, as Tim stumbled out of the bedroom at 11:58am, clearly following the scent of the pancakes stacked on the living room coffee table. 

She was on her laptop on the sofa, updating her TED talk, because the world moved on until she was ready to reboot it again. Her laptop rested on Roger’s feet, slung across her lap while he read the new Brandon Sanderson doorstopper. Kim was in the loveseat, surrounded by math homework but drifting to sleep because she had gotten up at 6:30am to go row boats before returning home for the unofficial official lazy Saturday.

Roger squinted at her over the edge of his book. Tim copied the look almost exactly, once he’d eaten one pancake and grabbed a second.

“Oh!” said Kim, pushing herself upright. “Twenty times nine times thirteen - T-I-M!”

Dodger smiled to herself. “Got it in one, thirty-one–thirteen.”

“Binary,” said Kim, satisfied. “Nice.” She held out cupped hands. “Tim, pancake me!”

Tim took another pancake for his mouth and, with a bleary night owl’s glance at Dodger and Roger for permission, took the entire plate over to the loveseat.

“Dare I ask what my new designation is?” Roger asked, amused and fond and visibly bracing himself to attempt mental math for the love he bore her.

For the same love, Dodger took pity on him. “Two.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is EXACTLY how I give nicknames, yes. I also apparently associate them closely with domesticity, and domesticity with food? Which I guess makes sense.
> 
> *Tim swearing voice* [Mary](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_the_Jewess) mother of Hermeticism -


	15. Teleportation

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's probably very sexy of me to do 6 consecutive purely upbeat fics. I wonder if I can go a whole week?

Roger approached the front door with a bag of groceries on one arm and two on the other, because who is not struck, from time to time, with the urge to test themselves against the common sense of just doing it in two trips. Before he could finish fumbling for his keys, Dodger slammed the door open.

“Roger!” she demanded, leaning out of the house with grey eyes alight. “Order me to go to the dining room.”

“What?” asked the living embodiment of language.

“I realized something about spacetime,” Math said impatiently. “But I need you to prompt it.”

“Ah-“ He cleared his throat. “Dodger, go to the dining room.”

There was a  _ whoosh _ of vacuum-displaced air as Dodger disappeared, and, almost simultaneously, a  _ crack _ from the dining room. 

“Got it!” Dodger cheered.

There was another crack of air, and a faint buffet of wind, as she reappeared in the foyer. She grinned, self-satisfied. “Got it on my own, now.”

Roger wanted to grin back, just for seeing his sister so happy, but too much recent experience made him put the groceries down carefully and ask instead, “You’re not warping the spacetime continuum around us again, are you?”

“Nope! Just moving the variables around within the existent equation - oh, shoot.” Her glee faltered, and she spun on her heel and called to the rest of the house, “Kim, Tim, everything’s fine! No gunshots, I’m just experimenting with spatial displacement!”

“Good catch,” Roger murmured as he one of the grocery bags and took the others for himself..

“I cheat,” Dodger murmured back. “Kim lists perfect numbers when she’s - ” 

She broke off when they reached the kitchen, where Kim and Tim had stopped halfway through assembling a chair. It turned out that when you bought a house and everyone moving in had either had their last house burned down or never had much of anything in the first place, there was a  _ lot _ of IKEA furniture to be acquired. Tim’s stare was as wary as an alley cat; Kim gripped a screwdriver like a knife. 

“Everything’s fine,” Dodger repeated, and picked up her grin again as she started unloading pasta. “Hey, do you kids want to go to the moon?”

_ Stop thinking there are rules _ , Roger reminded himself, before he could ask something along the lines of “ _ What _ \- ”

Dodger must have heard anyway, because she hip-checked him gently on her way to the cabinet, even as she continued addressing Tim and Kim. “The difference between twelve feet and 234, 697 miles is only a factor of about a hundred-and-three million. And four people rather than one…”

She started to wave her hand dismissively, then glanced back at Roger. “Maybe you should jumpstart me, actually.”

_ No rules _ . And it didn’t always have to be laced with tragedy.

“I could go for a trip to the moon,” he said, enjoying the effect of being casual about it. He put away the ice cream. “Tim, Kim?”

The younger twins had been having a silent conversation of eye contact and the faintest hand gestures. It was Kim’s turn to take the lead; she got to her feet a moment before Tim and said, “The moon sounds interesting. Would we go right now?”

“Why not?” Dodger said, and her eyes were bright with excitement again. 

Even if Roger hadn’t shared it, he wouldn’t have been able to refuse her. He grinned back. “Dodger, take the four of us to the moon - somewhere with a good view of Earth.”

Air rushed into where they had been.

(They had to summon more air after them, and heat, but that was even easier - and the view was entirely worth it.)


	16. Shelter-In-Place

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy one-month anniversary!! Reminder that Word of Seanan says Dodger is going to take about 5 years to fully calculate an ideal timeline, so all of this is canonically plausible!

On January 4, 2020, Dodger, frowned as she read a headline; stared into space for a moment, calculating; and announced that she was going to make a CostCo run later.

“How bad is it going to get?” asked Roger, who tended to pick up on words that weren’t quite said aloud, especially from Dodger.

“Not apocalyptic,” said Dodger, rifling through to the comics, “but it’ll feel like it a bit, especially if people in power are stupid about it.”

+

“ _ We _ can’t get sick, right?” 

Tim still had a tendency to ask questions while hovering in the doorway of Roger’s office like to enter would be to expose his neck to a territorial lion (though Roger knew for a fact that he came in to borrow books from the many bookshelves when Roger wasn’t there.) 

Kim, on the other hand, took a deliberate step in and folded her arms, demanding an answer so sharply that it nearly covered up the way she gripped her phone just a little too tightly. But the words still bounced between it and her:  _ first case in Berkeley _ ,  _ over-stressed hospitals _ ,  _ testing slow to start... _

To be honest, Roger had been wondering himself. 

“You probably know more about the physiological possibility than I do, off the top of my head. Alchemically speaking.” He shook his head. “But I wouldn’t think Dodger or I can - neither of us has gotten a cold in four years - and I assure you, you and Tim will not.”

He put some intent into the words, so the universe  _ listened _ . 

Whether because she could tell or she just got the reassurance, Kim gave him a lightning-flash grin and spun on her heel, already pulling up a text message. “Great! Then we can still be on for Saturday.”

“You should ask Dodger about the spread, though!” Roger called after her. “Just because we’ll be fine doesn’t mean it’s a good idea for everyone to gather…”

+

The first case in Berkeley was on March 3. On March 6, Kim and Tim made sure to take home all their textbooks, because on March 9, Rossmoor Academy shifted to online classes. UC Berkeley followed suit on March 10, for everything but physical education, labs, and studio and performing arts classes, with a two-day extension for professors who didn’t have online material ready. Roger didn’t need it - he tried to make sure everything possible was digitally accessible every semester, for students who needed it, and Zoom took care of the rest. 

Dodger already worked from home, so she just politely waited until shelter-in-place went official on the 16th to cancel a half-dozen talks and conference and plane tickets. She didn’t have any trouble - the many 1s and 0s that made up the computer systems wouldn’t dream of disappointing her.

+

“Fuck it,” Tim declared on the second official day, and opened a new tab in his browser. “I’m going to read and liveblog Homestuck.”

+

Kim paced through the house - living room, dining room, kitchen, stairs, bedroom, bathroom, bedroom, stairs, kitchen, hallway, offices, bedrooms, hallway, living room; reverse; repeat - 

Being trapped again, inside, just. Wasn’t doing it for her. Even with Tim, even with a house, even with trustworthy other avatars, even with - 

“ _ We’re _ fine?” she repeated, as she passed through the dining room again.

“We’re fine,” Dodger confirmed from her seat at the table.

“Great.” Kim agreed to a couple things on her phone. “I’m signing up for that ‘get groceries for old people’ thing on NextDoor. I’ll take my bike.”

+

“You’re cheating!” Roger pointed at the double-sixes Dodger had just rolled. “That is  _ cheating _ .”

“I’m not!” Dodger insisted as she moved her sports car out of jail and safely over to Chance. She drew a card. “Ten dollars for winning a beauty contest! Nice.”

As Banker, she awarded herself the money. 

“Sure,” Roger muttered, not at all under his breath. “This is the third time in a row you’ve skipped my orange hotels, but you’re not cheating.”

“I am  _ deliberately _ not cheating, actually,” Dodger snapped, “Which is  _ difficult _ .” She shoved the dice to her left. “Tim, your turn.” 

Tim took the dice, rolled quickly, and breathed a sigh of relief when he landed on Reading Railroad. Kim owned it, but she only owned the one railroad, and he could afford $50.

Roger snatched up the dice, and he and Dodger locked eyes across the board. The pressure in the air quite literally increased by a couple hPa.

_ Why are we playing this? _ Kim mouthed from across the board. 

Tim shrugged helplessly. There didn’t seem to be a way to stop it.

+

Kim hit refresh.

Then she reminded herself that this would only crash the website harder, and deliberately checked Discord. She checked every damn server she belonged to, even the ones she kept muted 24/7.

Then she went back and Ctrl-R’d again, and once more for good measure, and  _ this _ time the page loaded. 

She jumped off her bed to whoop, lean out of the bedroom and shout, “Harvard’s up! I got in! Tim, check yours!”

+

Dodger stared at Kim, the board, her letters, and back at Kim, her brow furrowed in concentration. Kim met her gaze with equal intent, and looked back to her own letters. An hourglass slowly ran out between them. Kim would have to play a word, soon.

On the sofa, Roger leaned over to murmur to Tim, “The real contest is each woman’s competitiveness versus how long it takes her to get completely fed up with Scrabble.”

Tim glanced up from his laptop (Act 6, Act 5, Act 2) and snickered. 

Without looking up, Dodger picked a tile out of the bag and threw it over her shoulder. It rebounded off Roger’s temple to hit Tim in the ear.

+

Roger sat at the kitchen table and read a news report from Boston. Ventilators stopped two states away, hospitals filling, deaths mounting in Norfolk, Sussex, Middlesex counties…

He didn’t realize he was just staring at his phone until Dodger’s hand landed on his shoulder. 

“We could check on them,” she said gently. “If you want.”

He leaned his head against her arm and admitted, “I did. Just…” He waved his hand, to indicate the many ways they had of getting information, none of which involved actually calling Roger’s parents. “They’re fine. Sheltering like the rest of us.”

(He wasn’t Dodger, wasn’t Math; he couldn’t just calculate probabilities or derive answers about anything in the universe. But computer systems were constructed by languages as much as numbers, hospitals and pharmacies and the firewalls that protected them, and humans wrote, spoke, sometimes even thought...it was difficult to hide from Language.)

“It’s more everyone else,” he said. “All of...the world.”

Dodger rested her chin on the top of his head, and her arms around his shoulders. “With great power…”

“Yes, yes.” It was his own words, agreed upon years ago. “And we can’t just go around ‘fixing’ things, because you can’t ‘fix’ people...”

“It still kinda sucks,” Dodger said pragmatically. “We’re definitely still rethinking it after next time.”

+

“G, U, E, J,” said Dodger, almost too fast to distinguish the letters.

“Queer,” said Roger, before she’d finished even finished.

“W, A, I, E, F.” 

“Jew.”

“L, N.” They were both leaning forward on the couch with intensity. Kim’s thumb hovered over the stopwatch button. Tim was just breathless. 

“Fin.” 

“K!” 

“Lagged, ki, time!”

Kim hit the button. “2:47:36!”

“Score, 920!” Dodger called.

Tim cheered. “Best yet!”

“5 seconds slower than our best on that front, though.” Roger shook his head ruefully.

Dodger bared her teeth in a grin. “Go again?”

+

Kim had been waking up at 6 AM or earlier six days out of seven for the last two and a half years. A little sheltering in place wasn’t going to offset that clock, no matter how much it was trying. The alarm was set for 7:30, about as late as she ever slept anyway, but her eyes opened of their own accord at 5:59.

She rolled over in the dim pre-morning light to see her brother sitting in his bed, headphones plugged into his computer, face lit by the screen.

“Dude,” she said.

“Time is dead and meaning has no meaning,” he said, waving her off. “Literally in this moment - oh, no he survived that. Fighting possessed chess pieces - ” 

He hit the spacebar to pause and blinked, for possibly the first time in minutes. “Fighting one possessed chess piece, actually kind of possessed  _ by _ Time, and one just really angry cyborg chess piece, on a rooftop. And another aspect of Time is fighting a third in the  _ realm _ of the dead - the third being the one that’s kind of possessing one of the chess pieces.” He blinked again. “That’s a lot, I guess.”

Kim rolled over and propped her chin up on her hands. “Time is going to fight you, personally, and win, when you realize we still have class in two hours.”

Tim put his hands over his face and dragged them down with a groan. “I just - it’s just one and a half more videos, and then I’m done. Well, except for the epilogue, but that’s a whole other thing. And the sequel, but I’m still - well, we’ll see, I guess.”

“You also have to host the D&D Zoom  _ after _ school,” Kim reminded him mercilessly.

Tim groaned.

+

The Doctrine of Ethos, as described by Pythagoras, held that certain musical instruments and modes could influence the balance between Logos (rational behavior and Pathos (emotional thought). Later alchemists came to see this as the interaction between the two halves of the human heart, and more, as the balance between language and mathematics. 

They are alike. Mathematics and language both describe, define, delineate. They can capture nuance down to the smallest percentage or nuance of meaning; they can touch infinity and work with it, even knowing that nothing man-made will be enough for that. They allow humanity to understand, influence, and even command nature.

They are different. Mathematics, one could say, deals in absolutes - there are right answers and wrong ones. There is room for infinite decimal variations between 0 and 1, 1 and 2, and so on, but once stated, they are fixed in place. The value of 1 never changes, nor the value of 1.75238234029380403298 repeating. Language, on the other hand, evolves, and moreover, expands. Math simplifies the world, allows it to be calculated - in the hands of math, gravity is 9.8m/s 2 ; time is measured. With language, gravity is the force that attracts a body toward the center of the earth, or toward any other physical body having mass - and it is seriousness. The giddy terror of freefall, the yank you don’t notice because it never stops until you leave the exosphere...and extreme importance. With language, time is elastic, time drags and flows and flies; it is high and ripe; it is made and saved and wasted. 

They complement one another. They go together. Hand in hand, math and language have charted the waves and forged alliances across them, reached for the stars and brought them to life, built worlds that could not have been dreamt of thirty years previously. 

They make music, by instruments great and small. The spheres of the heavens - “outer space” as we now call it - emit sound, so-called by math and language alike. On Earth alone, humans make music with string, percussion, breath and voice, and there, as in the days of Pythagoras, the Doctrine of Ethos resides. The logic of math defines the rhythm, the shifts in pitch between notes. The emotion of language rings true in the lyrics, the melody that has meaning as though essays and poetry were written in the letters that name each note. 

Without math, language would have nothing to keep it steady, nothing even to compose. Without language, math would have nothing to lend it form. 

Together…

The timing is perfect. Every note is hit. The emotion rings true with every word, and for a moment - or maybe for about five minutes and seven seconds - there is a montage of 390,000 years of working towards one another.

Then Roger and Dodger finish their living room karaoke duet. But the music of the spheres keeps playing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1\. Shoutout to the Internet Scrabble Club at isc.ro, which has a very old chat system I do NOT understand but has nonetheless been a boon to me these past weeks, as a space where one can basically go shout into the void, "hey, who wants to play Scrabble?!" and someone will answer.  
> 2\. I fucking...watched Collide again for this...there's good bits, guys...there's a lot of good bits...the fucking beheading...Roxy with the sword... fuck. We've all been there, Tim.  
> 3\. Tim and Kim host all their friend-group video calls because they have a Mysterious reliable internet connection  
> 4\. "For Good" from _Wicked_.


	17. Refurnishing

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Very short, to balance yesterday! (I keep veering, actually, between the desire to write short and sweet snippets and the desire to get this fic to 30k exactly in 30 days.)

In the abyssal depths of IKEA where no natural light reaches, where paths are defined by illusions and time and space are replaced by frozen clocks in outlines of rooms like full-sized dollhouses, Roger Middleton stared at a six-shelf bookcase.

The bookcase, were it able, would have stared back.

Roger looked away first. 

“I can’t,” he said. “I just...of course there won’t be another earthquake, we bled pressure off the fault. But I just can’t.”

“That’s fine,” said Dodger. She patted a sample three-shelf beside her. “We’ll get these and the four-shelves, and some of the skinnier ones and a bunch of the stackable squares to fill all the rest of the space, and we can get whiteboards to fill the wall space above them - or art, I guess?”

She sounded dubious. Art tended to be a thing other people put up, for Dodger. She had always been happiest with a full wall of open, erasable workspace.

Roger shrugged. He had never thought much beyond the bookshelves. Erin had hung the couple paintings they owned, in retrospect probably for show.

“How many of each shelf?” asked Kim, pencil poised over the notepad on which she was tracking their to-buy list. Tim carefully snapped a photo of the warehouse information and price tag of the three-shelf Billy. They didn’t know much about what to furnish a house with, much less have firm tastes, so Dodger had given them jobs to do as they all wandered through the store.

Dodger rattled off a series of numbers that amounted, so far as Roger could keep up, to enough about a mile’s worth of shelving. Which was good, because tomorrow’s errand was every secondhand bookstore in the immediate area. 

Dodger clapped her hands, a model of determined efficiency. “All right, that settles storage. On to kitchen?”


	18. Farmers' Market

Confession from the writer: I’m feeling a little slow on this, today. My mind’s been bouncing around other things; none of the ideas I’ve had already are appealing. But then I remembered that I’d thought that today, Saturday, I’d talk about the Berkeley Farmers’ Market, while it’s not happening. So…

This isn’t a fic, properly; sorry about that. This is a paean to the Berkeley Saturday Farmers’ Market, which I miss even though I haven’t been to it in like...probably nearly a year, even before the shelter-in-place...even though I fully could, any week, if I just woke up and got out of the house...

But it counts for this fic challenge, because here’s the thing: if you live adjacent to the UC Berkeley campus and you’re busy most weekdays, with classes taught and taken...well, grad school has somewhat flexible schedules; you could end up going to the Tuesday market on Dwight or the Thursday market...somewhere. But really, Roger and Dodger’s farmers’ market was almost certainly the biggest and best of them: Saturdays from 10am to 2pm, on Center between MLK Jr. Way and Milvia St.

So that’s probably one of the first places they take Tim and Kim - before they’d gotten settled into a house, even. Once they get a house in Albany, maybe they transition slowly to going to the Kensington market on Sundays, a small but fully functional affair for weekly fruit&veg shopping, as well as some good fish and eggs. Or the El Cerrito Plaza market on...I want to say also Saturdays?

But, and perhaps pardon the childhood bias, the Saturday Berkeley market is the superior. 

Due to some esoteric law, perhaps in conjunction with the proximity to the park or the high school, it’s technically a street fair that happens to take place weekly. Sometimes it really _is_ a fair - the Winter Crafts Fair, or whatever exactly celebrations happen on Indigenous Peoples’ Day every year. (This is Berkeley; Columbus can get fucked smallpox.)

Let’s start at the top - no, okay, let’s start at the Berkeley Central Library three blocks away, because there’s Roger and Tim here, and I, personally, generally hit the library first, then caught up with my dad and brother at the farmers’ market. The very few arm muscles this writer had were built up carrying like ten books down three flights up stairs and then over to the farmers’ market, and proceeding to carry them around until we’d finished shopping and lunch. This is Tim’s first library...possibly ever, god, that’s so fucked up. The only reason they don’t just lose him completely in the stacks is that Kim won’t leave his side and she wants to actually get to the lunch part of the day.

There’s lunch at the farmers’ market, obviously. Starting at the top, there are tents offering Mexican - burritos, quesadillas, tamales - or Indian - broad naans, the scent of spicy curries jumping into your nose - or even Japanese, long rolls of sushi pre-wrapped but homemade and very good. There’s also a stand that sells sweet kettle corn, the walls of the tent made of netting to let the steam escape. 

But that’s not how you get the best lunch at the farmers’ market. Dodger is holding Kim’s hand again, I think, and Kim of course has Tim’s; Roger keeps up the rear and they end up going something like single-file as Dodger weaves expertly through the crowd. Not too fast - there’s a time for targeted shopping and there’s a time for ambling on a sunny Saturday, and so long as Kim and Tim can tolerate the still-new sensation of a crowd, the farmers’ market is generally the latter.

Highlights:

There’s a good apple stand on the right, with varieties lined up sweetest to tartest. The pickings are a little slim in late June, but that’s okay - they’ll be back to full strength in a few months.

Towards the top, after the tents/booths/stands for more substantial meals, every other stand is for root vegetables and leafy greens, and every other stand is for pitted fruits or late strawberries, maybe even blueberries. No raspberries; those aren’t really native. Maybe some blackberries, but those you might as well go pick for yourself up the hill in Tilden Park. Dodger will want potatoes, I suppose.

A third of the way down, there’s another apple seller on the right, notable for the green felt cloth that always covers their tables and the cooler of apple-cherry juice at the front of their tent, in pints and half-gallons. They’re always so cold, even in the hottest part of summer (which is not this) that they’re half juice, half frozen slush. Or you can nip back across the street to Bernie’s Best Apple Cider, manned each week by Bernie himself, a scruffy-haired man whose hair has been going grey for years but still matches, in style, the picture on the labels. In the winter, you can buy warm cider in paper cups there; in the summer, it’s small glass bottles, miniatures of the 8oz and 12oz bottles. You can also buy a gallon, or a crate and pick out your preferred percentage of Autumn Blend and Gravenstien ciders.

(No crate today, I think, for the cuckoos. Certainly not if they’re still living out of hotel rooms - thought I can’t imagine that would last long. Between math and language, an appropriately priced house would happen to be available soon, and the paperwork wouldn’t take long.)

Let’s say it’s lovely out, the fog dissipated by noon and the sun paramount above a few scattered clouds. Let’s say that the crowd isn’t too much because it barely seems to notice them, flows around them with a little more than the usual unconscious care of those used to busy streets. 

This is a fictional, slightly fantasy world, so let’s say the chocolate raisin man is still there, or maybe one of his grandchildren kept up the business. I’m not actually sure he had grandchildren, but he certainly seemed like a grandfather. In this world, due to one timeline-shaping choice or another, his chocolate mixer never broke and he or a family member is still there, operating out of an old red truck, settling bags of sweet plain raisins and, much more importantly, bags of dark, milk, or white chocolate-coated raisins. And, oh, the ever-exciting _mixed_ bags!

There’s a flurry of stands selling meats and cheeses in the middle of the block: sausages and ham hocks; eggs; a full range of jacks and colbys, cheddars and even curds. The meats need to be gotten last, but a good block of cheese - 

Oh, the music! There’s always music at the farmers’ market, musicians scattered in lots along the length of the street, so you’re never out of range. A married couple with a fiddle and a ukulele play home-written country, an open violin case before them and a stack of CDs to sell. An old man with a guitar plays Billy Joel as nostalgic as the Piano Man ever deserved; there are a few chairs set up for an named audience. A young woman with another fiddle plays a jig so furious that two children have started swinging in a circle in the space before her, while their harried mother picks out carrots in the next tent over.

There’s a stand on the right with a basket of giant pretzels in the open and pastries under plastic cases. Kim and Roger get pretzels; Tim gets a reaper bun (named for the aorta-threatening sugar and butter content) and Dodger gets a blueberry danish, because good god I’m thinking about those danishes now and I _really_ want one.

There’s a stall that sells pickle-on-a-sticks next spot down, which is exactly what it sounds like, and then Morrell’s Bread, loaves dense enough to build houses with, and at the very bottom, baguettes of olive bread that have been $5 each for as long as I remember. Across the street there’s Three Twins Ice Cream, with tiny paper sample cups of flavors like cardamom and lemon cookie. 

They’ve been shying to the right for bread - time to go back up the left a bit, to a two-lot tent with every variety of pitted fruit, at the peak of its season. They wrap around the wide stand in a panoply of color: orange apricots late in their season, and red and purple plums, yellow and red-white nectarines, soft orange-yellow peaches are starting to come in. And everything in between: both Tim and Kim, I think, would enjoy reading the sign defining apriums (75% apricot, 25% plum); pluots (50/50); and plumcots (25% apricot, 75% plum.) The sign rests on the only piece of furniture in the center of the tent: a table with a two-tiered sample case with labeled bowls offering every fruit there, and toothpicks and discreet trash bowls. The savvy (and slightly shameless) customer systematically tries one slice of everything, and Dodger and Roger are, among other things, savvy farmers’ market customers.

And then - having acquired fruits, bread, cheese, and drinks - it’s time for lunch. There’s the park, of course, a wide expanse of grass scattered on this sunny day with picnickers and frisbeeists. There’s a stone art piece of concentric stone walls, easily big enough to sit on or between. But the real best spot is to walk back up to the Ledge.

It’s deserving of the upper-case. It’s special. It’s attached to the outside of a government building on the corner beside the market, and it’s guarded by knee-high, slightly spiky plants. It’s just high enough to require some arm strength to climb up - though Roger’s lankiness lets him avoid some of that. Dodger will lever herself without a thought, angle and force an unconscious calculation. Tip will heave his bag of books up first, and Roger might walk along, around the corner, to show Tim and Kim where the ground slopes up so it’s a little easier to hop up. 

There’s a sign on the wall saying, “KEEP OFF THE LEDGE” in chipped but quite clear letters. They’ll sit directly in front of it because that’s really the only way to live, sometimes. The Ledge is wide enough that even a full-grown adult can lean against the cool wall and stretch their legs across the width and only have their heels brush up against the edge.

So...they’ll sit, in the shade on a sunny Saturday afternoon, in front of the KEEP OFF THE LEDGE sign. They’ll pass the components of lunch back and forth between them: olive bread torn off in chunks; pluots and nectarines and apricots and maybe an apple, a pile of pits slowly growing on a napkin someone scavenged from a pocket. Cold apple-cherry juice that they have to shake a couple times to break up the ice before drinking, and it’s thick and sweet. Kim and Tim swap half a pretzel for half a reaper bun; Dodger and Roger take turns using a car key to cut slices of pesto jack to go with the bread, because sometimes you remember to bring a knife and sometimes you improvise. They can talk or they can people-watch and listen to the fiddler and the gentle bustle of urban agricultural commerce, and some very vocal frisbee players in the park.

It’s not quite home, is what I’m saying - maybe nothing is, right now. It’s not quite family, not yet.

But it will be.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Raise a parting glass to Three Twins Ice Cream, out of business as of Friday, April 17. They'd been having financial difficulties, and hte pandemic took them in the knees. You will be missed.
> 
>  **Note from 5/5:** I have not actually dropped out of this! I still have many plot bunnies to pin to page! But I got more aggressively attacked by narrative lapines for other fandoms, and honestly, jump-starting my creative drive was kind of the goal of this in the first place, so...I’ll be chasing these new rabbits for a while more. But god knows we’ll still all be sheltering in place for a while, so stay subscribed!

**Author's Note:**

> Got a favorite line? Suggestions for more chapters? Share!


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